1. General overview
In their series Benjamins Current Topics, John Benjamins publishers re-edit special
issues of John Benjamins published journals. Contrastive Pragmatics is such a reedition
of the Languages in Contrast special issue 9.1 (2009) and contains
contributions originally presented as a panel at the 10th IPrA conference in
Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2007. The individual contributions are all quite valuable,
although a number of objections can be made regarding the scope of research and
the lack of updated information for the book publication that remain problematic (see
point 3 below).

2. Individual contributions
The introduction explains the origin of the special issue from a conference panel of
2007, gives an overview over the volume and introduces the individual chapters. The
description of the scope of the volume appears a tad overgenerous, the “strong focus
[…] on regional (especially dialectal) variation (‘variational pragmatics’ […])”
promised in the introduction (1), for example is really nowhere to be seen in the
volume, and it turns out that the index entry ‘variational pragmatics’ only refers to the
introduction and that the most important recent book on variational pragmatics
(Schneider and Barron 2008) is only referred to once in the volume, again in the list
of references to its introduction.

2.1. Modality and ENGAGEMENT in British and German political interviews
Based on Martin and White’s systemic linguistics-oriented appraisal framework
(Martin and White 2005), Annette Becker studies intersubjective positioning of British
and German political journalists in election-night interviews with politicians. The
results of her detailed analysis show that in spite of the large diversity of linguistic
resources the interviewers use, at least in this specific genre the dimensions of
pragmatic differences between British English and German as observed by House
(1996), can be detected.

2.2. The intersubjective function of modal adverbs
In her short chapter, Agnès Celle compares French and English evidential or
identificative modal adverbs such as évidemment / obviously and apparemment /
apparently in the French and English editions of Le Monde Diplomatique. She
concludes convincingly that while those adverbs establish a pragmatic relation in
both languages, they modify assertion in different

ways in each language. French
identificatives imply an (unspecified) viewpoint other than the speaker’s and at the
same time signal that the speaker distances themselves somewhat from that
viewpoint. This latter characteristic is not shared by English identificatives; apart from
that, in contrast to French identificatives, they suggest the addressee’s viewpoint as
a basis. Modal adverbs also function within a language specific macro-organisation
of discourse, with tense cooperating in the pragmatic function of modal adverbs in
very different ways in both languages.

2.3. Intersubjective positioning in French and English
Bart Defrancq and Bernard De Clerck show in their chapter that English to depend
as well as French dépendre, and in particular the forms it depends, respectively ça
dépend, are undergoing a grammaticalisation toward pragmatic markers of
intersubjective positioning. The corpus-based analysis is sound and the arguments
are stringent. Unfortunately, the diachronic statement “French ‘dépendre’ seems to
be slightly more advanced on the path to discourse marker status” (68) is not
convincingly supported by any diachronic data. Also, though the French corpus the
authors use is the specifically Belgian French one collected in the “Valibel” research
centre at the University of Louvain, no attempt at discussing possible diatopic
variation within French is made.
The chapter closes with a bit of a cliffhanger, the authors stating that further research
would be needed, amongst others into equivalent verbs in other languages such as
Dutch. It would have been nice if there were a reference to a publication co-authored
by one of the chapter authors that does just that (Defrancq and De Sutter 2010). But
there isn’t one.

2.4. Challenges in contrast
Using a function-to-form approach, Anita Fetzer analyses discursive challenges in
British and German political interviews after a discussion of the pragmatic function of
challenge and its linguistic forms in British English and German. In both languages,
interlocutors within the genre prefer challenging the context of another interlocutor’s
contribution rather than challenging its force or presuppositions, although the British
corpus shows more variation in this respect. The face threatening potential of
challenges is mitigated by a high frequency of cognitive verbs and more formulaic
language in the British corpus, while the German data show higher frequencies of
both indirectly formulated challenges and elliptical structures.

2.5. Interruption in advanced learner French
In what the author herself refers to as an “exploratory study” in the abstract (97),
Marie-Noëlle Guillot attempts a quantitative study of interruptions in English and
French by L1 and

advanced L2 speakers of both languages. Guillot bases her
qualitative categories of interruptions on Julia Goldberg’s (1990) type of schemes for
interruptions. Of course, Goldberg, as well as most of the theoretical literature the
author builds her study on, developed her model with Anglo-Saxon culture and
English language as the default. Guillot’s references to English-French contrastive
studies are restricted to two authors, neither of whom is Bert Peeters, whose seminal
study of 2000 would have been an important point of reference for theory, and one of
whom is only referred to with a 1993 article instead of her recent book (Béal 2010)
which would have been very close to the topic. Consequently, the study lacks a
convincing theoretical foundation and while the conclusions are interesting, the data,
particularly in conjunction with the somewhat Anglocentric scheme used to
categorise interruptions do not, in my opinion, fully support the interpretation given in
the conclusions, that there is a

tendency for L2 French subjects to orient to non-affiliative interruptive acts as acts of competition and conflict,
as is stereotypically associated with native French, whereas L1 French subjects tend to orient to them as acts
of cooperation in the build-up of argument (117).

2.6. Closeness and distance
The first of two diachronic studies concluding the volume is Martin Luginbühl’s
chapter on the development of the TV news genre on Swiss German public TV as
compared with the US news program CBS Evening News from 1968 to 2005. It sits a
bit uneasily within the scope of the other chapters, its methodology and background
being closer to media studies than to linguistic pragmatics. The study is interesting in
its demonstration of how the Swiss program changed its format over time to become
more similar to the American news program format, without ever entirely giving up its
“Swiss” character. The chapter could have been quite relevant for contrastive
pragmatics (even for cross-varietal pragmatics across the German speaking area, if
German and Austrian TV news programs had been included). Unfortunately, the
basic concepts of closeness and distance taken from media theory (126) do not
become linguistic concepts just by referring to linguistic texts that use the same terms
(137), since of course there is a whole different terminological history of those terms
in linguistics. Another unfortunate use of terminology is the insistence on using the
rather literal translation “text type” for what has become known as Textsorte/Texttyp
in the German tradition of text linguistics, but what in the English tradition is much
better known under the term of ‘genre’. Thus, the index points to genre and text type
under two separate entries, which somewhat defeats its purpose of linking similar
topics in different chapters.

2.7. The nominative and infinitive in English and Dutch
The last chapter is a thorough and convincing diachronic study of a structure that
many European languages took over from Latin, the “nominative and infinitive” (NCI,
nominativus cum infinitivo). Thinking outside the box of the traditional discussion of
the NCI as a mere passive alternative, Dirk Noël and Timothy Colleman distinguish
three types of the NCI (a passive, a descriptive and an evidential NCI) and discuss
the development of those types in both English and Dutch from the 17th to the 20th
century. In both languages, NCI patterns appear to have reached the peak of their
relative frequency in the 18th century. However, while Dutch NCI constructions show
a sharp decline after that peak period, a similar decline of English NCI constructions
after the 18th century only occurred in fictional literature, while such structures
properly came into their own as evidential NCIs in English academic and journalistic
texts from then on. I probably enjoyed reading this very well researched and argued
chapter with its comparative as well as diachronic dimensions most of all chapters in
the book. The enjoyment could only have been any greater if the authors had not
apparently neglected to update the reference list from their 2007 conference paper,
as shown by a journal article published in 2007 which is still marked “to appear” in
their list of references (177).

3. Conclusion and points of criticism
The individual contributions in this volume are intellectually stimulating and
interesting. However, in spite of the rather general volume title Contrastive
Pragmatics, they represent a quite narrow choice of only four Western European
languages, contrasted in pairs in each chapter (and of whom furthermore Dutch is
only studied in one of the chapters), a restricted field of pragmatics (e.g., ignoring
important and cross-linguistically varied micro-pragmatic phenomena such as
address), and, what is most disturbing for a 2011 publication, the state of research in
contrastive pragmatics of ca. 2007, only here and there updated for the 2009
publication of the Languages in Contrast special issue. For the 2011 volume, all that
appears to have been further updated are the individual authors’ post-2009
publications in the references sections of their respective chapters. Even references
to such publications in the text or in endnotes have been left without a matching
update (e.g. on pp. 35, 60 and 135). The authors also neglected to correct obvious
errors such as mistyped titles in reference lists (e.g. p. 95), mix-ups in references to
examples (e.g. p. 42) and some idiosyncratic non-native English (such as the often
rather German commas and hyphenation in Fetzer’s chapter and the similarly quite
German syntax in Luginbühl’s).
While it is easy to see the benefit of recycling a hardly updated version of the 2009
special issue of Languages in Contrast for the publisher, the editor and the
contributors, I am not

entirely sure that the benefit of this particular form of recycling
for the reading public is immediately apparent. After all, the special issue mentioned
continues to be available both in print and electronic forms.

Defrancq, Bart and Gert De Sutter. 2010. Contingency hedges in Dutch, French and
English. A corpus-based contrastive analysis of the language internal and -external
properties of English depend, French dépendre and Dutch afhangen, liggen and zien. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15(2): 183–213.